


as good a day as any

by sugarybowl



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mosaic, brief mentions of suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 07:11:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18177482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarybowl/pseuds/sugarybowl
Summary: The beauty of all life involves changing your mind a few times.





	as good a day as any

**Author's Note:**

> Without my beta boss friend Brie this would be a nightmare of mixed tenses, so all praise to her.

The first time they discuss it is not the first time it had crossed their minds, but it was the first time it had crossed any of their lips. It wasn’t meant to mean anything other than something more to say when the sun came up. He placed a kiss on Arielle’s arm and one between Quentin’s shoulder blades when he extricated himself from between them and said, “Up you both get, today might be the day and if it is I want you to fuck like bunnies in my honor and I want to be early enough to beat traffic.”   
He was already in the kitchen, which wasn’t much of a journey, by the time he realized both the warm sleepy bodies in the bed were alert and rigid, both of them watching him as he stood there with a jug of yesterday’s coffee in his hand.   
“Wow, that’s the first time in two years I’ve gotten you up without coffee,” he said, feeling not unlike a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar or his hand down the neighbor’s pants.   
Quentin looked somewhere between grumpy and confused, likely from waking up without his coffee or a blowjob, but Arielle looked  _ angry. _ Arielle who had never seen and could only imagine the nightmare of New York traffic seemed to understand what Eliot was getting at.

Eliot set the coffee jug down and took a seat at the edge of their bed.   
“I’m sorry Ari,” he said with a little pat of her hand, “it was bad joke. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“But why did you...” Quentin’s voice was terrifyingly small, “Eliot why ...do you think you’re going back to Earth without me? We started this quest together you and I...”   
“And her, now,” Eliot said as gently as he could, turning to Arielle and reaching out to take her hand. 

“Don’t mind your husband he doesn’t think things through.”   
“So your plan is to finish the mosaic and leave us,” Arielle said, less angry now that the pieces fell into place.   
“It’s not my plan, I don’t have a plan.” Eliot shrugged as casually as he could without a martini, “Maybe a door will come with the key and we can all go through it, or maybe there will be no door and we’ll have to figure out how to get the key to our friends many years from now. We can’t know that. But the possibility exists, given the fuck-you-without-lube nature of all quests, that the door will come and only two that came in can go back through it.”

He ran a hand through his own curls and then reached out to Quentin.

“And if that’s the case Q,,” he said finally turning to look at the other stricken face looking back at him, “you’re going to honor the vows you took in front of me and the village and some honestly gaudy floral arrangements. And you’re going to stay with Ari for the rest of your days. You’ll name all your children after me, Eliots and Eliottas, and you’ll tell your grandchildren once you’re old and have no filter that you once had a High King of Fillory in your bed and he fucked like a particularly debauched god.”   
He could see it in their eyes that they wanted to argue, that they wanted to bitch at him and probably cry or scream or fight about it. He hadn’t meant to do that - he hadn’t meant to hurt them - but so often it didn’t matter what he meant or didn’t mean to do. He still did.   
“We don’t know what will happen when we finish the mosaic. It’s pointless to worry about those things,” he said, tucking his finger under Quentin’s chin and leaning forward to kiss Arielle’s forehead, “we’ll cross that fucked up bridge when we get there.” 

They continued to stare at him and he found that in that moment he couldn’t bear how much he loves them both, and how much he can never quite say it...or how very much he is going to miss them. So he took Arielle’s latest pattern from the stack of them on the table and left two cups of coffee poured on the counter. He took the cape that Quentin had made him in a shade of purple that they really couldn’t afford, and headed out to the mosaic without looking back at them. 

Today was as good a day as any, after all. Today would be no more or less awful a day to leave them than tomorrow.   
-   
They never really talked about it again until the early morning before Arielle gave birth.   
“But you have a few hours yet and it’s best she walks about until it’s time,” the old woman said, nodding at Ari’s beautifully terrified excited face. “I will be back after midday just in case.”   
Quentin thanked the woman with a smile like ten suns, and Eliot escorted her the whole five feet out to the garden where he placed a tentative hand on her shoulder.   
“I know there’s no knowing with these things,” he started. He knows that women aren’t cattle but bringing life into the world is always dangerous and Eliot had seen so many glassy eyes and starved newborn things in his own childhood, “but if there is anything we can do to make her safe…”   
“You’re frightened, I understand it, even if I don’t quite understand your quaint arrangement,” she said, not unkindly. That is what the villagers called their family, sometimes with judgement and sometimes with glee,  _ that quaint arrangement _ .

“I delivered Arielle into this world and I was there when her mother didn’t live to tell it. But it will be what it will be, so if you have gods, you should pray to them.”

Eliot nodded and his hands were knots that will be spells to protect her but will never be enough, nothing can guarantee the safety of a mother or a child - the risk in it produces a magic all its own.   
The matron left with a basket of plums under her arm as payment and Eliot stared at the empty mosaic until a scream broke the quiet. 

  
Later, seeing Quentin and Arielle hold their son for the first time was the kind of axis-shifting moment that Eliot had only heard corny people waxing poetic about. After, the moment that Arielle poured her son like a bouquet of flowers into Eliot’s arms came and he thought that it was not so much a shift of axis, but a sudden and improbable brain transplant. How his mind would never be occupied with anything but adoration and concern for this teeny tiny thing. He’s suddenly overcome with rage at Arielle’s uncle who, when handed a child just like this one, with soft cheeks and closed eyes, found himself unable to love it. Eliot feared he might empathize with the man, thought that when the moment came he would understand and find himself empty and unable to love. But Eliot loved the tiny human in his arms, he loved him shamelessly and with extreme prejudice.

Later when Arielle and the child were sleeping, Eliot stared out at the empty dip in the ground where their day’s work should have been.

“I didn’t even start today,” he said when he felt Quentin beside him. “I was useless for hours but I didn’t… just in case it was today. I didn’t want it to be today. I wanted to know him and hold him. So I didn’t try today, just in case.”   
“Eliot,” Quentin said, taking his face between his strong calloused hands, “we’ll stop for now. We’ll stop for a few days. We’ll stop for as long as you want. Five years, Eliot, what’s a few weeks or a few months off? We can just be with him, we can just be here.”   
“We can’t,” Eliot was resolute in denying himself the temptation. “I can’t. If I stop, I might never start again. And I have to, I have to see this through for Margo, for the rest of our friends, for Earth and for Fillory and for him. He’s going to be a magician like his dad and he needs the magic that is missing in the future. I can’t stop, Q.”

Arielle woke ups looking tired but whole and healthy, and the bundle in her arms was whole and healthy and mewling rather than crying.  It was a hungry pushy thing that was ‘as obsessed with tits as his dad’ and Eliot accepted this as the gift-curse that it was. He promised himself that if and when the time came, he’d cross that fucked up bridge when it got there, and he’ll do it on his own. 

But he didn’t start a pattern that day. Eliot vowed to never start a pattern on Teddy’s birthday for the rest of his days. That day, he thought, truly would be a more awful a day to leave them than the next one.   
  


-

“She’ll be buried beside her mother,” the sack of shit standing in front of him said, “on family land as she should be.”

Quentin clung to Arielle’s corpse with such ferocity that Eliot looked at her uncle and at the cart he brought with him and thought, ‘ _ You bastard, you’re going to have to take him with her _ .’ 

“Can’t you control him,” the man grumbled, “have him show some dignity in front of his boy.”

“I can’t think of anything more dignified than mourning her like the sun fell out of the fucking sky,” Eliot said, holding Teddy close to him just as ferociously as Quentin clung to Arielle’s body. 

“I need to start home if we’re gonna put her to ground tomorrow,” the man answered instead.

“She should be buried at Whitespire,” Eliot muttered into Teddy’s hair, “your mama was the beloved of kings. One day, there will be a big tree with her name in the gardens of the castle, it will grow peaches and plums on the same branch, and speak and say funny clever things.” 

The little boy in his arms sniffled and burrowed his wet trembling terrified face into Eliot’s chest. 

“You should stop filling his head with stories before he gets older,” the man beside him huffed with a sidewards glance.

“You should stop looking at my son before I skin you,” Eliot hissed back at him.

After Teddy was heavy with exhausted, sobbed-out sleep and after Quentin had felled like a tree over the body; Eliot pried Quentin away with all the strength he had left and let the old man take away the corpse that used to be the woman that had given them everything. He let him do it so that Teddy wouldn’t have to grow up beside his mother’s grave as Ari had grown beside hers. 

The next morning when he woke with Quentin’s spot cold as Arielle’s beside him, his heart stopped. His blood ran in those petrified moments only by the beat of Teddy’s own heart over his chest. Slowly he lifted the boy up and tucked him into the covers, and ran with bare feet to the garden of their universe. He found Quentin there, not hung from a tree or drowned in a stream but immersed in the last pattern they had started, the one Arielle had finished drawing before the fever picked up. 

“What if this is it, Eliot,” Quentin said with a broken laugh, “wouldn’t that be just the fucked up bridge we were waiting for?”

“Yeah it would be,” Eliot said, as his heart picked up its rhythm again inside his rib cage. 

“We go together or we don’t go at all.” It was so rare that Quentin said something with such finality that he sounded like a King of Fillory, but today was a rare day. 

That evening when the sun set and the last tile was ready to be placed, the three of them sat there with their capes on and a drawing of Arielle her cousin had sent as mourning gift clutched to Teddy’s chest. They held their breath. 

Today, Eliot thought, was as good a day as any, since every day from now on would be at least little bit awful without her. 

 

-

 

Teddy was sixteen years old when he sat his fathers down each with their individual favorite dinners and took a deep shuddering breath.

“If this is about you falling in love with a talking animal,” Eliot started before the boy could get a word out, “I want you to know your dad and I support you. But you have to try harder if you’re trying to rebel, Tedster.”

“I’m not in love with a bear, Pop.”

“El let him speak,” Quentin laughed, that same laugh that warmed Eliot’s bones in the dead of winter. “What’s going on, Teddy?”

“It’s  _ Ted _ , dad.”

“It’s gonna be Teddy until you’re 80, Teddy. What’s on your mind,” he asked again.

Teddy turned about seven shades of green before he finally opened his mouth.

“I just… if one day...I’m not sure I want to go to Earth,” he whispered, his head hung like he’s six and caught with worms in his hair again.

“Oh.” The word came out of Quentin like he was shot.

“Daddy...Poppa, please don’t be mad. It’s just Fillory is home and you two are home and I love everything here and I think our life is...don’t you think our life is pretty great? I don’t want...I don’t want to go.”

Eliot took Quentin’s trembling hand, and then reached his other across the table to lift Teddy’s downcast chin.

“Baby I am...I am so sorry.”

Ted swallowed a visible knot in his throat and closed his eyes. Eliot had never before seen their son look this defeated. 

“It’s okay. I’m sorry I said anything,” their sweet boy said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“We usually don’t–” Eliot started, as he looked into Teddy’s eyes, Q’s hand still shaking in his. “We usually never mean to hurt the people we love. Your dad and I never meant to hurt you, Teddy. And I’m sorry we did.”

“I… what?”

“You should never have had to worry about that.” Quentin’s voice quivered in self-directed anger. “You should never have had to have that burden on your shoulders. We didn’t make sure that you knew that the quest comes second to you. The quest comes second, Teddy. Always.”

“We thought if you knew everything, then we were doing the right thing,” Eliot agreed, “but you should never have been worrying about when you’d have to leave everything behind because your parents have spent your whole life on a quest.”

Quentin’s voice was soft and paternal when he spoke again, “Teddy we all know it might never happen, but what your Pop and I do every day, we do it for you as well as for everyone we left behind.”

“I know,” Teddy said urgently, “I know I know that. I don’t want you to stay here for me if it happens, I - I want more than anything for you to bring magic back, to see aunt Margo and aunt Julia again. I want you to get everything you worked for and I… I want to stay here when you do.”

They sat in silence for a while, the heft of the words settling around them, their meaning seeping into their skin.

“Teddy if we leave we may not see you again until you’re very old. We might...not see you again,” Quentin reminded him.

“I know. I know that.”

“We’ll stop,” Eliot said, in that voice that Q liked to call residual High King. “Almost 20 years, Q, we get time off.”

Teddy looked panicked, as if that wasn’t what he’d meant at all. “Stop?”

“We’ll stop,” Quentin agreed, reaching across the table to take Teddy’s hand. “We’ll stop until it’s time to start again. Until you’re 18 or 21 or whenever you feel ready. We’ve given our lives to this quest, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get to set the schedule. We’ll cross that fucked up bridge when we get there, and we’ll get there on our own freaking time.” 

Eliot stood up, pulling both of his boys up with him and wrapping them in his arms.

“It’s never going to be a good day for it,” Eliot whispered into Teddy’s hair. “But there’s no rush. A good day will come.”   
-

Quentin reclined on a daybed on a summer afternoon. He was surrounded by grandchildren with names like trivia answers fished from stories their grandpop used to tell. Occasionally, he would feel a squeeze of his hand and open his eyes to Teddy’s face, lined with years and framed by thinning grey hair. Other times he’d feel a brush of lips on his and open his eyes to see a young man’s face, eyes like a dark moon and love written on his face. 

“Eliot,” he whispered, because talking above a whisper was senseless these days. “Eliot, the bridge turned out not to be so fucked up after all, right?” 

The vision of the man above him was joined by a girl with intelligent eyes and hair like sunshine. She looked like his son.

“Arielle,” he gasped with a smile. “Teddy look, it’s your mama and pop...”

He could see Teddy’s face again, he could see them all, and his boy who wasn’t a boy was crying with a smile on his face. 

“Yeah dad? Are they here, now?”

“Yeah,” he breathed out. “Yeah they’re both here today. I think today is a good day for it, don’t you think? A better day than tomorrow to go with them.” 


End file.
